One of my good buddies has been working on this for a while. Continuous build, test, deploy infrastructure in the cloud - pretty cool stuff, and its a pain to do it right in house, so a good candidate for outsourcing. Disclaimer - I dont work for these guys, nor have I actually used their services. Yet.;-)

Fortunately the only thing that matters in a hiring decision for me is demonstrable competence. You could be a cruelly mutated sea snail, and if you demonstrate the ability to solve hard problems, have a healthy sense of curiosity (and ideally a sense of humor), and seem likely to be able to work well with others, thats all that matters. The metric above is mostly for entertainment, but I *dare* you to plot some of your business associates. For maximal entertainment, pick folks on the financial side... VCs tend to work better than most in my experience, but YMMV.;-)

So it turns out the further away from the origin (0) you get on the x axis, the closer to the origin (0) you get on the y axis. That is, the taller, waspier, more 'male', and more attractive you are the higher are the odds that you are incompetent in every sense of the word. So if you ever meet a short, non-waspy, non-male, unattractive person in a position of power, be very, very careful. They are probably extremely competent.;-)

This model is clearly US centric, btw, I suspect it wouldn't hold up very well internationally....

I dunno about that, I am stuck working with Windows mostly because of SolidWorks and Autocad. Find me a reasonably comparable open source alternative, or even something I can buy for linux and I could drop Windows like a hot potato. And no, Blender just doesn't cut it yet...;-)

But for coding, number crunching, analysis, or anything else linux comes up trumps. And I still cannot believe folks actually use Eclipse for anything serious. heh.

iONiUM writes: "From the article, "they warn that ocean life is "at high risk of entering a phase of extinction of marine species unprecedented in human history"." More disturbingly, ""We've still got most of the world's biodiversity, but the actual rate of extinction is much higher [than in past events] — and what we face is certainly a globally significant extinction event."""Link to Original Source

You bring up a key point. Despite how 'mainstream' the geek has become, if my buddies and i get fired up about something *actually technical or science related* when we are out and about with the gadfly crowd the coolness meter goes down real quick. Doesnt matter how 'cool' people think the geekery is, the evidence still suggests actually being passionate about science and technology isnt going to be your shortcut to the in crowd. Probably never will be, but *that* would be a change i could get excited about.;-)

BTW, in my experience going with any onboard sound card is not the best way to go these days. I used to use lots of different high end sound cards, but now that new high end DACs (digital analog converter) actually have USB input, the best way to get sound out of a computer/digital device is the same way you get it off a high end turntable or CD transport - go from source to DAC, then convert it. The device drivers that allow you to treat an attached USB device as a digital audio device are very good, available for all platforms, and quite simple.

So forget the sound card completely (and definitely dont use the onboard sound), go with a DAC that has USB and you will be amazed. Can also pick and choose a DAC that suits your requirements and pricepoint without messing about with your system config... Like i said, this is a huge deal for folks who like to use computer based audio sources. Least it has been for me...

Really? A fictional guy when there are so many more unbelievable real folks to choose from? Maybe Leonardo da Vinci? I mean, he was so cool he had a cartoon superhero named after *him*. Ok, so it was a mutant turtle, but still...;-)

Or at least some sort of microkernel based virtualization... forget about antivirus, firewalls, and all that noise. Just give me a fire and forget OS that is refreshed anew with each power cycle. My cell phone is *supposed* to be an appliance, after all. Keep the data on the network, and refresh the OS from a known good copy every time i turn it on...

Who am i kidding, there is too much money in OS vulnerabilities for this to ever fly...;-)